Communication Systems for Semantic Work Environments

The paradigm of a flexible environment that supports the user in producing, organizing, and browsing the knowledge originates in the early 1940s, a long time before the first personal com-puters and new communication tools like the Internet became available. The conceptual design of Vannevar Bush’s memex (Bush, 1945) (an acronym for Memory Extender) is probably the most cited (e.g., Gemmell, Bell, Leuder, Drucker, & Wong, 2002) and criticized (e.g., Buckland, 1992) representative of such early conceptual work. In his article, Bush described the integrated work environment that was electronically linked to a repository of microfilms and able to display stored contents and automatically follow refer-ences from one document to another. A number of visionary ideas from this early conceptual work can be recognized in state-of-the-art information systems (cross-references between documents, browsing, keyword-based annotation of docu-ments using the personal “codebook,” automatic generation of associative trails for content sum-marization, etc.).